Alternative Culture

“We live in a complex world and the motivation to use violence to solve problems needs to be seriously questioned. It is essential that we help our children perceive peaceful alternatives.

We need to use these troubled times as an opportunity to create a new vision for the future.”

Let’s face once again the ambiguous profile of our time: what is its secret essence? That of the end or that of a new beginning? Are we old, waiting for everything to finish, or are we young, waiting for everything to start again?

This time we are living, the human time, situated within the biological time, 4 billion years old, in turn a fraction of the universal time, inaugurated by the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, is it the finish line of an evolutionary path about to end, or is it the moment when the irreversible trend towards higher forms of consciousness has finally found the sense of itself? The spark that lights this road of ours, randomly deployed at the periphery of one of the many existing galaxies, is a benevolent spark or a cruel one? Is it a god that loves its own children, or is it a god that generates them only to devour them, as Saturn in the old mythologies?

Those are questions as ancient as mankind, to which no definitive answer is given, if we attain to the reality under our own eyes. The ambivalent signs of the present are mutating the once-mainstream positivistic optimism into a feeling of incertitude about human existence that is mining, for a growing number of individuals, the same possibility of living a meaningful life.

According to an illustrated archetype from Jungian psychology, humanity is at the same time senex, old, and puer, young. We are fractured, in the depths of ourselves, by this dual polarity.

The senex polarity is apathetic, abstract, calculus-oriented, constantly reducing the quality assessment to quantitative measurements; it signifies the loathing of novelty, of any creative flair; it requires the principle of self-identity, of A=A; it is the rejection of the different, of any reason that cannot be explained by a rational approach. In a word, the empire of the senex is the empire of order.

The secret impulse of the senex is that of death, he is a necrophiliac, since he lives by the other pole of life, that were life fades away. He generates his children to consume them later on. It is because of him if we are instilled with the existential doubt by which life could be evil in itself, since it implies a rupture with the perfect order that every being is initially supposed to have with itself, and thus seen as a disease whose only cure is death. This mal de vivre is not a mere effect of some personal misfortune; it is an existential condition that secretly accompanies every human being, even those who apparently enjoy the seductions of everyday life.

Saturn and its culture of death hide today under many different masks, subliminally manipulating our collective subconscious to accept reality as it is, passively, with no desire to change.

Are there still, between us, poets able to awake the young boy asleep within ourselves? Are there left, in the cities of today, devoted spaces for the bards to lead us with their music along the magical paths of our hidden memories, of our forbidden dreams? Towards different landscapes from the ones insistently suggested by the TV commercials? If the human story were really about to end, then we would indeed be living in the time of Saturn, the pernicious senex, the cunning executioner of hope.

But luckily the old empire of order is always uncertain, because in us lives also the other polarity, that of puer: the excitement for new beginnings, the pleasure from surprises, the love of contradiction, the divine folly that exceeds any set boundary. The senex raises walls and the puer tears them down, the senex, as the rulers in Plato’s city, would like to regulate even the mating between man and woman, the puer weaves extravagant plots (isn’t Cupid, with its bow and arrows, a young boy?) so that free love can overcome any pre-conceived rule.

Today everything, even procreation, appears to be under the strict control of the senex. The global governing structure is now fully dedicated at limiting population growth worldwide, officially in order to raise the standards of living and preserve international peace. The establishment resorts to open socio-economic policies such as women empowerment and family planning, along with covert biochemical measures such as sterilization through vaccines or reduction of fertility via endocrine disruptors.

As always, necessity is on the side of the senex: the population explosion of the last century poses an existential threat to ourselves and to the entire planetary ecosystem, hence population control has become, now more than ever, an absolute and inescapable necessity for the human species. But this doesn’t mean that we should accept the ongoing genocide engineered in secret by the elites, which is damaging our physical and mental health, compromising our genetic heritage and subverting our family structure. The sooner this reality is freed from the confinement of state secrecy and consciously embraced by the world population at large, the sooner we can have peace without poison.

The future of humanity depends therefore on our ability to compromise between senex and puer. The challenge and nobility of life lie in our effort to conciliate order with love, conservation with creativity, respect of traditions with the wish of starting all over again.

The task of the puer is not to revolt against the status quo; rebellion only means death, as it happened to so many young protesters guilty of chanting puerile messages at the shadow of the Great Elder. The youth of today is left with the task of interrupting for a moment the chain of necessity, so to reactivate, along with hope, the possibility of new horizons not marked on the current maps of power.

Our generation must lead humanity out of this mess, and the first step is to face the truth, as disturbing as it may be. The second is to get organized, and start working together towards a common future.

1. Expose the culture of death and secrecy that is suffocating our world,
2. Give birth to an alternative culture of life.

Let’s now give a closer look at this alternative culture. What will be the set of beliefs, norms and social behaviors that we want to promote around the world?

We will examine the new culture from 4 converging perspectives:

• Cultural worldview
• Cultural purpose
• Cultural ideology
• Cultural practices

Worldview

The old story was one of separation. Individuals were seen as separate entities competing for survival and dominance on a local level, just like cultures were seen as separate systems competing for survival and dominance on the global stage. To the theocratic dogmas of the middle ages succeeded the axioms of positivistic illuminism, inexorable against the primitive cultures as the former had been against the unfaithful ones. By negating every cultural difference through its technological might, the western civilization ended up denying the other face of itself.

If we really want to find an answer to the radical questions emerging from this historical blind end in which we are trapped, we have to dare seeking more in depth. In every human we can distinguish two levels: the conventional identity determined by one’s own culture, and the unexpressed potential holding all the latent possibilities that haven’t yet found actuation. “We are… double in ourselves”, would say Montaigne.

Historically, each particular culture had a tendency to see itself as the necessary condition for the complete realization of humanity: hence the aggression directed towards the strangers (the barbarians, the savages), hence the reciprocal contempt between neighboring cultures, each presuming to represent the only real human. But if, as documented by history itself, cultures are able to compenetrate one another, to the point of individuals passing from one to the next, it’s because, beyond the superficial differences, every culture derives from the same evolutionary axis in which converges all that is and all that is becoming, the realized and the yet to realize.

The shift is possible today since we’ve grown mature enough to confront respectfully cultures other from our own, allowing our identity to reconnect with that original point in the phylogenetic time that stands before the cultural differentiations within our species.

If it’s true that humans currently exploit only a fraction of their full potential, this partial black-out is most probably due to the aggressive impulses that until now have been segregating humanity to its pre-human condition, making it impossible to maintain a mutually constructive relationship with the rest of humanity.

Now everything is ready for the other process, rooted in the unitarian origin of the species, to prevail: the process of reciprocal fecundation.

The new era reveals and points out to a way never attempted before and today made possible, or better necessary, by the structural unification of the planet and by the intricate web of interdependence that now clings together the various human groups around the earth.

It’s the way of equality within diversity, and diversity within equality.

It is indeed the epiphany of the Other, which entails a modification of the old individualistic and ethnocentric mindset towards a new relational identity that is at once fully self-aware and fully open to novelty.

By recognizing the other as such, I keep on being myself while becoming enriched by the difference. This difference, once repressed in the subconscious, reemerges to light and becomes part of my conscious human potential.

If we abandon ourselves for a second to an unconditional hope in humanity, we should be able to visualize this image: the native cultures coming toward us with the gift we desperately need. They bring with them the last chance of discovering the original human essence lying deep inside ourselves, the living seed which glows beneath every single determined cultural manifestation. In fact, every culture that rejects reciprocity is condemning itself to infertility and extinction.

The new era is asking the West to accept the gifts coming from far away, from those regions of the Earth where humanity preserved the treasures of the infinite fecundity of the species; these gifts hold an immense heritage of wisdom, exactly what we need to find the answers that currently elude our conventional knowledge. Tolerance, a virtue of the Enlightenment age, is not enough today: we need a dynamic approach able to promote the birth of what is waiting to be born.

Writes Levi-Strauss:

“We must listen to the wheat growing, encourage secret potentialities, awaken all the vocations to live together that history holds in reserve.”

The new mode of relationship between cultures has to be founded on a planetary humanism able to integrate together all the locally-determined cultural aspects. Our call, today, is to weave together in a common web all the different ethnic threads that have been broken or dispersed, in order to allow an integral re-composition of the human mosaic, a synergic collaboration of the human fragments for too long separated by the struggle for power, and that today must converge to form the whole picture.

As stated by Plato in the Convito, “each human is the symbol (‘tile’) of humanity”. The present time demands to every human tribe a decisive opening towards the construction of a world peace based on global interdependence, by contributing to the birth of a new planetary consciousness which embraces all human experiences as active components of its history and its future.

Purpose

The evolutionary tension of the species is usually curbed by the reactionary forces, which inhibit all those latent possibilities whose time has not yet come. But the tension remains active just below the surface, and inspires each individual and culture with the urge of transcending itself.

Transcendence of self and culture,

this is the purpose of the new human.

If it appears impossible, it’s because it requires a rupture in the continuity of the present. As Karl Jaspers would explain, transcendence appears as meaningless as a void imaginary space, since we are used to distinguish reality from fantasy on the basis of the traditional culture we were born into. And yet transcendence is really as meaningful as the sum total of all our possibilities, since every manifest cultural form we see around us today is in fact only a temporary stage of our advancing evolutionary journey.

History, especially in the western world, was what indicated the way of human progress. By teaching to every child what was considered meaningful and by erasing everything that wasn’t, history gave its unilateral interpretation of the past (the version of the winners) and explained the future in terms of an inevitable extension of the present.

But the time of the new human is not historical.

The eastern wisdom would instead distinguish instead between the Ego and the Self. History was seen as the horizon of the Ego, while the Self would inhabit the incommensurable depths where time never changes.

However, the new human doesn’t even identify with the eternal.

We can’t reject the historical dimension as illusionary since it really is an expression, even if partial, of our inner potential. To deny material existence in the name of an eternal being, to discard the intricate plot of living impulses as evil temptations of the flesh, is the recurring risk to which the new human is constantly exposed, it’s the choice of monasticism to escape the frivolousness of everyday life.

That’s how the ‘care for the world’, the concern for the future health of the planet, turns into a resentful resignation against the fellow humans guilty of betraying the absolute truth for a mere illusion. In a thousand different forms, today again we see reemerging this mystical narrative whose final effect is nihilism, the fascinating but sterile reiteration of the ‘nothing ever changes’.

But that’s not how the new human will find the key to escape its cage made of ancestral traditions, because the horizon of the new human is not the eternal, but instead time, seen as a measure to realize the possibilities that were previously inhibited; it isn’t the refusal of life on earth, it is on the contrary its synchronization to the universal trajectory of evolution.

The whole dialectic between historicism and nihilism is inscribed within our present culture, and the new human doesn’t need to pick a side but rather to transcend it altogether.

The time of the new human is the future,

and precisely that future potential which will realize itself from the womb of the present. The evolutionary wave hasn’t stopped and, seen from this perspective, today becomes an essential step in the process of crafting the human of tomorrow.

The future hidden inside us is not a time to come whose signs are already available at present — the future of futurologists — it’s actually time coming towards us and bringing with it, as feasible alternatives, new ways of expressing our inner potential while adapting to the universal cycles.

Humanity knows today, as clearly as never before, that we are one thing with the universe and with life: first in our origin, since we emerged from the same evolutionary process, second in our destiny, because any force we’ll impose on the eco-system will retroact on ourselves. That’s why there’s no truth for humanity in a rejection of the material world.

The human truth lies in its transcendence, or even better, in the strong image of St. Paul:

“in the acceptance of the burden of the groan that’s coming to us from creation, the groan of a mother giving birth to a child.”

There is a kind of love for the world that is perdition, flattening of the potential to what is already given, losing oneself in the picture of humanity worshiped by the mainstream culture. In that picture the future is portrayed as a mere extension of the present order, and that kind of future we must reject. At the same time we must reject the escape routes into the eternal, into the deep self or subconscious, all ways of turning one’s back to the world.

The new human faces the world since it is conscious of the latent intentionality that drives humanity through the ages, transcending itself. Even when it rejects this world, the new human is deeply in love with it, and accepts the achievements of the species when they bring forward a fulfillment of the human potential or they are its condition, while condemning every human condescension with the old, every slavery masked as freedom, every archaic tribalism simulated by the propaganda.

Our double nature is not as simple as to identify all traditions with evil and all novelty with good. Evil is rather to assume tradition as the only measure to what is becoming, while good is to assume as a measure the full potential of life, that keeps transcending its present forms.

The universal human, anthropos, is a normative idea that presides at the cyclical evolution of the species, and this ‘originative archetype’ is to be rather intended as an eschaton, the vanishing point on the future horizon.

It is true indeed that our unexpressed potential has left many colorful traces along the journey that took us so far, but the vital sense of the human odyssey is not carved in the sacred artifacts of the past, it lives ahead, on every shore where humanity, today, is awaiting for its future.

Ideology

This last phase of civilization, the industrial age, was able to achieve and diffuse new standards of life characterized by a staggering level of consumption and thus by an equally high entropic ratio.

While introducing a new order, the industrial activity also brings about a dissipation of energy, so to say a disorder. The structures created by mankind, as all other existing ones, are finally ‘dissipating structures’.

The technological era has indeed modified the reality of the planet by imposing a rational order on things, and consequently it has also dramatically increased the entropic disorder. Human civilization today is a huge dissipating structure absorbing live energy from every corner of the planet only to return it degraded. When we talk about pollution we are in fact talking about energy that is no more available for use within the system.

That the current civilization is speeding towards its end is not just an apocalyptic mantra, it’s a common-sense realization confirmed by the scientific data. Time goes on and on exactly because energy passes continuously from a state of availability to one of unavailability. Our time will end when we’ll have exhausted all the available energy, and our system will reach maximum entropy. The development of energy-consuming technologies is therefore equivalent to an acceleration towards the end of the world.

It was necessary that by the hand of mankind life would enter a phase of extreme precariousness, so that our collective consciousness could rejoin the roots it shares with all living beings and so that, thanks to this descent, we could rediscover the intimate relationship and interconnectedness that sustains our whole biological family. The natural world we used to call non-self isn’t by any means in contrasting opposition to our human consciousness, it is instead an endless plurality of free subjectivities that surround humanity in a reciprocal web, without which the flame of our consciousness would inevitably fade out.

Humanity must therefore re-establish an unbroken link with nature and with life. We must again learn to invoke the energy of living things and to recognize, as did the native cultures throughout the world, that one can take from the Earth and the atmosphere only so much as one puts back into them.

In other words, we must shift from a consumerist culture to a regenerative culture.

As envisioned by Daniel C. Wahl:

“What lies ahead of us is the promise of a truly regenerative, collaborative, just, peaceful and equitable human civilization that flourishes and thrives in its diverse cultural and artistic expressions while restoring ecosystems and regenerating resilience locally and globally. The best of our music, art, poetry and technology will be elegant expression of the symbiotic unity of nature and culture.”

Practices

Work

In the industrial civilization, the primary means to value a person was its productivity, generally measured in terms of income: “Tell me how much you earn, and I’ll tell you how much you’re worth.”

But an unexpected development has emerged from the last current stages of the industrial era: more and more jobs that once required skilled human labor are now being performed by A.I. machines, and consequently the global need for workers is dropping steadily and could reach soon, according to some authoritative projections, a mere 20% of the human population. The technological advances in the fields of Nano-engineering and automation will compel humanity to rediscover existential time, that share of everyone’s life that had been marginalized by the modern obsession for business.

The myth of homo faber is declining thanks to its own technological achievements, leaving space for a lifestyle not very different from those preserved by the pre-modern cultures around the world. That the essence of mankind would realize itself through labor was the dogma of the industrial civilization, and that dogma today is being falsified within its own practice.

Science

Our aim should be to critically refocus the scientific paradigm by integrating it both with those perspectives that were excluded from the roaring season of positivist thought and, above all, with the wisdom coming from the last standing cultures able to preserve and maintain a pre-modern lifestyle.

We have to distinguish between reason and rationalization. Scientific knowledge has too often been a ‘rationalization of the reality’, an ordering of the world according to our immediate economical interest. The function of reason is, on the other hand, to unmask the real motives behind every cognitive degeneration by means of a constant critical inquiry of knowledge’s premises.

This is the true great heritage the modern age is leaving to the world to come: reason as a critical instrument able to constantly question and renew itself.

The duty of the scientist is to keep open and fertile the dialogue with the universe, without the pretension of ascribing it, in its entirety or by progressive reductions, to the mechanistic paradigm, even if this method proved useful to enhance mankind’s cognitive and operative grasp on the world.

There is no given approach able to reduce reality to some univocal explanation, since reality is complex. A reason authentically open to dialogue has to take into account the non-rational aspects of reality, since those aspects hold a mystery that may be solved only after a modification of the approach paradigm.

Another prejudice we must expose is the presumed “neutrality of scientific research”. Every cognitive endeavor we undertake implies a modification of the world and of the entropic process, and therefore it has consequences that affect the entire system. There are many obvious cases when, in foreseeing possible negative effects deriving from a certain discovery, the responsible scientist must set some kind of preventive self-limitation to its work.

Art

As the Situationist International had already foreseen in the ’60s, advanced capitalist cultures increasingly tend to express and mediate social relations through objects. Instead of expressing our authentic individual desires in real life by direct experience, we end up expressing false massified desires through the exchange and consumption of commodities.

The result is a widespread psychological alienation, inflicting significant and far-reaching damage to the quality of human life for both individuals and society. In the last decade, with the emergence of mobile technologies, this alienation has reached endemic proportions and now threatens the wellbeing of the present and future generations.

The situationists called this far-reaching mass media system spectacle, and tried to counteract it with the construction of situations — moments of life deliberately designed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, feeling the excitement of life and adventure, and granting a sense of liberation from the daily routine.

Even if the organization formally dissolved in 1972, the present moment requires us to resuscitate their idea and purpose. We urgently need a new, alternative art movement, ranging from music to literature to theatre, which can convey to the people of the world our message of change.

Relationships

In his book Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds, sociologist Zygmund Bauman notes how in the age of mass-consumption even from love we came to expect the same as from our other purchases: novelty, variety, disposability. We want sex to be more like shopping, for it to be transparent and easily gratifying.

But emotions and people are not commodities. Relationships are not techniques to be mastered. “Concentration on performance leaves no time and room for ecstasy,” he warns.

In order to be truly happy, we must learn to see ourselves and other living beings as an end and not as a means.

When we love somebody, we also love the vital environment within which our relationship is set. Of course even love itself cannot escape the entropic process, which is fundamentally tied to the nature of life: the entropic curve is the inescapable frame of our finiteness.

And yet love operates in anti-entropic fashion, harmoniously integrating polarities in the universal rhythm of life, placing the common interest in front of the personal profit, in conscious solidarity with other living beings.

Our happiness as humans comes from nurturing meaningful relationships. The longest study ever done on the subject, from Harvard university, found that satisfying relationships with family, friends and community are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.

And love should’t stop there. As Jeremy Rifkin explains, we’re now more than 7 billion people on the planet and we have to “extend our identities so that we can think of the human race as our extended family and the biosphere as our community”, we must “rethink human nature to bring out our empathic sociability so that we can rethink the institutions of society and prepare the groundwork for an empathic civilization.” Let’s get to work!

Feel free to leave any comment or question below, and join the discussion on the dedicated forum.

Also in Eden Planet:

• World Ethos — Ethical charter for the new era
• Earth Constitution — Legal framework and eco-justice
• Planetary Confederation — Grassroots glocal organization

Other WAM! publications:

Life Tribe

A new humanity

Coop Network

A new economy

Conscious Forum

A new consciousness